PRIMARY and Secondary Education Permanent Secretary Mrs
Tumisang Thabela has said she receives almost 200 WhatsApp messages daily from
individuals against the reopening of schools.
She revealed this at Lubuze Primary School in Insiza
District, Matabeleland South on Thursday where she was launching Grade 7
English and Mathematics handbooks, aimed at improving access to education in
marginalised communities.
Government is working towards reopening schools for
examination classes with Grade 7, Form Four and Form Six classes set to open on
September 14, for Cambridge writing classes and September 28 for those sitting
for Zimbabwe School Examinations Council (Zimsec) examinations.
It is also working on modalities towards the safe reopening
of schools and will be providing all learners with personal protective
equipment when schools reopen. For safe reopening of schools, the Ministry of
Primary and Secondary Education aims at improving water supplies at the schools
and has partnered with a development institution to drill 1 000 boreholes in
learning institutions within the coming two weeks.
Mrs Thabela said despite the efforts being made by the
Government, some members of the public were sending hurtful messages over why
they were working to reopen schools.
“Every day when I sit down at the end of the day, I have an
average of 400 WhatsApp messages, especially during this time of Covid-19. Out
of that 400, almost half are attacking me and telling me that what I’m doing is
nonsense. ‘You can’t open schools, why do you want to risk the lives of our
children and all sorts.’ And sometimes I wonder whether people who say this
actually have children. If they have them, whether they have children in the
public schools that I deal with,” said Mrs Thabela.
She said instead of people attacking her over what her
ministry was doing to reopen schools, she was expecting reasonable parents to
proffer solutions on the safest ways to reopen schools.
“Because a parent who has a child whose life has been
disrupted and continues being disrupted would rather come to me and see what we
can do and see how we can move forward rather than the one who would say no
child should go back to school,” she said.
Mrs Thabela said while some parents and guardians do not
want schools to reopen, they were the same people sending children outdoors,
which could easily expose the minors to the global pandemic.
She said they will continue working towards making a
positive change in the education sector so that parents see the value of
educating their children.
Mrs Thabela said she was pained when she interacted with
one parent a few years back who questioned the importance of education after
sending his four children to school without any of them succeeding, yet he had
sold most of his livestock in trying raise money to educate them.
She said following that discussion, she has made it her
mission to ensure education can positively impact communities and spear
development. “We are the current leadership of the education sector. We don’t
want to be like Methuselah who made an entry into the Bible just because he
lived for a thousand years and then he died. There is nothing else you will
find about Methuselah apart from the fact that he lived for a thousand years
and then died. All of us should not just live for so many years then die
without an impact. All of us should leave a legacy and we can only do that by
working in the field of human capital development,” she said. Chronicle
0 comments:
Post a Comment